Transform Your Healthcare Career, Mental Health & Leadership
35 Evidence-Based Books by Susan Leys - Healthcare Consultant, Coach, and Author with 30+ Years of Experience. Practical guidance on healthcare burnout, ADHD strategies, mental health, leadership, and sustainable wellness.
Life Lessons for All of Us....
Life Lessons began as a poem, and then transitioned into a piece of mixed media art. The words resonated so deeply that they found their way into this book — a collection of timeless truths crafted to guide readers at every stage of life taught to me by my Dad. The cheerful green turtle on the cover is no accident: in our family, we've always believed in the tortoise's quiet wisdom: "Slow and steady wins the race" — and this book is built on exactly that kind of enduring, unhurried truth.
Life Lessons is a book for all of us. Whether you're a young person working out who you are and what you stand for, or an adult revisiting the questions that matter most, these pages meet you where you are. Each lesson explores something essential — empathy, curiosity, resilience, trust, connection — through warm storytelling and real-world examples that feel both immediately useful and worth returning to over time.
This is not a book you read once and set aside. It's one you'll pick up again at different crossroads in your life, finding exactly what you need each time. Readers have called it a quiet companion — the kind of book you give to someone you love, or keep close for yourself.
Bestselling & New Titles
Start here with our most popular books - trusted by thousands of healthcare professionals, leaders, and families seeking evidence-based strategies for mental health, communication, and caregiving.
Anxiety A to Z: How to Conquer Stress and Master Calm in the Digital Age
It's 2 AM. Your thoughts won't stop. You need help right now—not a book you have to read from the beginning.
Anxiety in 2025 hits differently — constant notifications, doomscrolling, and information overload have created a new kind of overwhelm that older anxiety books weren't written for. Every technique in Anxiety A to Z is backed by published research. From mindfulness-based stress reduction to the neuroscience of how anxiety hijacks your brain, each chapter gives you the science in plain language—and tells you exactly how to use it.
ANTs: Transforming Automatic Negative Thoughts Into Positive Lessons
Your brain is lying to you. Not maliciously — automatically. Those relentless negative thoughts that spiral before bed, undercut your confidence, and narrate your worst fears? Psychologists call them ANTs: Automatic Negative Thoughts. And they can be unlearned.
ANTs: Transferring Automatic Negative Thoughts Into Positive Lessons gives you a practical, evidence-based system for catching negative thought patterns in real time — and converting them into self-awareness, growth, and lasting mental resilience.
Tact.
The most important communication skill nobody taught you.
You're smart. You're well-meaning. And somehow you're still saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person.
School taught you algebra. Maybe a little grammar. But the deeper stuff? How to disagree with your boss without torching the relationship. How to tell a friend something hard without it turning into a whole thing. How to deliver bad news with grace. How to say no without a three-paragraph apology. How to sit with someone who is falling apart without immediately reaching for a solution. That part? You were mostly on your own.
Until now.
Navigating Care Together: A Family's Guide to Compassionate Caregiving
Are You Drowning in Caregiving Stress? This Guide Throws You a Lifeline.
When your loved one needs care, everything changes overnight. Suddenly you're juggling doctor appointments, medications, family drama, and your own breaking point. You feel lost, overwhelmed, and guilty for wanting help. You're not alone. And you don't have to figure this out by yourself.
"Navigating Care Together" is the roadmap you've been searching for.
Let's Just Think: 12 Powerful Thinking Skills to Transform Your Decision Making Forever
Most of us react without thinking. We jump to conclusions, repeat the same mistakes, and wonder why better solutions elude us. But what if the answer isn't thinking harder—it's thinking differently?
This book honors the thoughtful, deliberate approach to life that transforms ordinary thinking into extraordinary results. Let's Just Think reveals twelve powerful thinking skills that can change how you approach every decision, problem, and opportunity.
Mental Wellness Essentials
Honest, research-backed strategies for managing anxiety, overcoming depression, recovering from burnout, and building mental health that lasts. No toxic positivity. No quick fixes. Just real tools grounded in 30+ years of clinical experience helping thousands navigate their mental health challenges with compassion and evidence-based approaches.
The Strength in Breaking Through: A Man's No-BS Guide to Conquering Depression and Anxiety
From the book: "You already know something is wrong. Maybe it shows up as anger that comes out of nowhere, or exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, or the feeling of being physically present in your own life while being somewhere else entirely. Maybe it's the anxiety that rides along with you through every shift, every commute, every family dinner where you sit at the table and wonder why you can't just feel normal. You haven't said anything because that's not what you do. Because there's work to get to and people depending on you and no time for this.
But toughing it out isn't working. And you already know that too."
Cope! Your Comprehensive A-Z Guide to Master Your Mental Health
There's a moment — and you probably know it well — when you realize you've been coping by not coping. White-knuckling through anxious mornings, numbing out through stressful afternoons, lying in bed at night with a mind that won't stop replaying everything you should have said, done, or felt differently. You know something has to change. You just don't know what to try, or where to start, or whether anything will actually work when the next wave hits.
COPE! was built for exactly that moment. COPE! isn't another fluffy self-help book. This is your complete mental health arsenal—a step-by-step guide with the exact coping strategies therapists charge hundreds per hour to teach.
Anxiety A to Z: How to Conquer Stress and Master Calm in the Digital Age
Your phone just buzzed. Your inbox is overflowing. Your to-do list grew three items while you were reading this sentence. Anxiety in 2026 hits differently — constant notifications, doomscrolling, and information overload have created a new kind of overwhelm that older anxiety books weren't written for. This book is for you if you need anxiety tools you can use right now. If you deal with racing thoughts, sleepless nights, or panic episodes — if you want evidence-based strategies, not vague advice to "just relax" — if you're managing the constant stress of digital overload, work pressure, or life transitions — or if you've tried other anxiety books that inspired you but didn't give you practical tools, this is the book for you.
Fury to Forgiveness: Conquering Anger and Finding Inner Peace
You already know your anger is a problem. You don't need a book to tell you that. You've seen it in the faces of the people you love: the flinch, the withdrawal, the careful quiet that settles over a room after you've exploded. You've replayed conversations at 2 AM, knowing exactly where you went wrong, knowing exactly what you should have said instead, and knowing with absolute certainty that the next time the heat rises, you'll do the same thing anyway. Because in the moment, something takes over that's faster than your good intentions, and by the time you're thinking clearly again, the damage is already done.
This book is for that moment. And everything that leads to it, and everything that follows..
You're Not Broken: Real Talk About Mental Health and How to Step Off the Struggle Bus
For Younger Adults
Your brain is telling you lies. It's time to stop listening.
Anxiety says you're in danger when you're safe. Depression whispers you're worthless when you're not. Stress convinces you everything's falling apart when it's not. And you've been white-knuckling through life believing all of it.
Here's the truth: You're not crazy. You're not weak. You're not broken. You're just stuck and need a map.
This book is that map that will teach you.how to shut down panic attacks in real-time, recognize when you're spiraling before you crash, ask for help without feeling pathetic, build coping strategies that fit your actual life, and create a future that doesn't break you.
You're Not Failing at Life: Real Talk About Depression, Anxiety, and Building Mental Health that Lasts
For Older Adults
You're doing everything you're supposed to do. So why do you still feel like you're failing?
You'll learn why seemingly successful adults still struggle with mental health and why that makes complete sense, how to recognize when you're genuinely struggling versus just having a hard week, why therapy and medication work for some people and not others, how your other medications might be quietly sabotaging your mental health, why coping strategies that used to work have suddenly stopped, and how to build a life that supports your wellbeing instead of draining it — even when you have no time, no money, and no energy left.
Tired of all the divisiveness? Me too.
Something has shifted in the way we talk to each other — or more accurately, the way we've stopped talking to each other. Conversations that once ended in respectful disagreement now end in blocked numbers and severed friendships. Families fracture over dinner-table topics that didn't used to carry the weight of identity. Workplaces that once tolerated difference now quietly sort themselves into ideological silos. And beneath all of it, two ancient emotions are running the show: anger and fear.
Culture in Crisis isn't a political book. It's a psychological one. Written by Susan Leys — a healthcare consultant and crisis management specialist with 30+ years of clinical experience in emergency psychiatry — this guide examines the division epidemic through the lens that most cultural commentary ignores entirely: what's actually happening inside the human brain when we encounter someone who sees the world differently than we do. Why does disagreement so quickly escalate to contempt? Why does fear of the unfamiliar override our capacity for curiosity? And most importantly — once we understand those mechanisms, what can we actually do about them?
What makes this book particularly valuable right now is its refusal to take sides in the very divisions it addresses. Susan's clinical background means she approaches anger and fear as human universals, not as evidence that one group is right and another is wrong. The strategies here aren't about convincing anyone to change their beliefs. They're about rebuilding the capacity to stay in relationship with people whose beliefs differ from yours — in your family, your workplace, your community, and your own internal dialogue.
Each chapter closes with actionable exercises designed for immediate application, whether you're trying to repair a fractured personal relationship, foster genuine inclusivity in a professional setting, or simply become someone who can hold space for disagreement without losing yourself in it.
We don't heal division by demanding that everyone agree. We heal it by remembering how to be human in the presence of difference. This book shows you how. of the unfamiliar override our capacity for curiosity? And most importantly — once we understand those mechanisms, what can we actually do about them?
The Social Fear Cure: From Anxiety to Authentic Connection
Your heart pounds. Your mind goes blank. You spend days replaying a conversation, convinced you said something wrong.
You're not broken. Your brain is just stuck in a protection pattern it no longer needs — and patterns can change.
The Social Fear Cure: From Anxiety to Authentic Connection is a neuroscience-backed, clinically grounded guide that shows you exactly how to rewire your brain's response to social situations — without years of therapy, without fake confidence scripts, and without pretending to be someone you're not.
Social anxiety affects nearly one in six adults. Most suffer in silence, quietly shrinking their lives to avoid the discomfort — turning down career opportunities, keeping relationships surface-level, and settling for loneliness because it feels safer than risk. This book was written for every one of them.
How to Talk About Your Feelings: Simple Words for Big Emotions - A Guide for Kids Ages 5-10 and the Grown-Ups Who Love Them
Your child feels everything. The joy that makes them bounce off the walls. The anger that erupts without warning. The sadness that settles in and won't explain itself. The worry that keeps them awake at night, churning through fears they can't quite name. And when you ask what's wrong, you get the same answer every parent knows by heart: "I don't know."
They're not being difficult. They're feeling something they don't have words for yet. And that gap between what a child feels and what they can express is where so much of early childhood struggle lives.
How to Talk About Your Feelings was written to close that gap.
Tact.
The most important communication skill nobody taught you.
You're smart. You're well-meaning. And somehow you're still saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person.
Welcome to being human.
Tact isn't a personality trait you either have or don't. It's a skill. A learnable, practiceable, genuinely life-changing skill. And the reason so many smart, caring people are walking around without it is simple: nobody taught it to you.
Tact teaches you how to disagree with your boss without torching the relationship. How to tell a friend something hard without it turning into a whole thing. How to deliver bad news with grace. How to say no without a three-paragraph apology. How to sit with someone who is falling apart without immediately reaching for a solution.
Elder Wisdom: Authentic Voices Inspiring Life Lessons
In a world constantly chasing the next new thing, we often overlook one of our most valuable resources—our elders. They hold decades of experience, hard-earned lessons, and a perspective on life that only comes with time.
Elder Wisdom: Authentic Voices Inspiring Life Lessons opens the door to their stories, offering a heartfelt look at the joys, struggles, and pivotal moments that have shaped their lives.
Through candid conversations and reflective storytelling, this book brings together voices from all walks of life. Each chapter uncovers powerful insights on resilience, gratitude, love, aging gracefully, finding purpose, and living with intention. With humor, grace, and raw honesty, these elders share the wisdom that has guided them through life's most challenging and beautiful moments.
Healthcare Resilience and Wellness Series
Whether you work in healthcare or you're caring for someone who depends on it, you know the toll it takes. Healthcare professionals face impossible demands, moral injury, and chronic exhaustion. Family caregivers navigate a complex, often impersonal system while managing their own burnout. Both deserve support that actually works.
The Healthcare Resilience & Wellness Series provides evidence-based strategies for healthcare workers sustaining their careers and families navigating care for loved ones—because thriving shouldn't require choosing between your wellbeing and showing up for others.
From Burnout to Balance: 10 Powerful Shifts Every Nurse Needs to Excel in Their Careers
Reclaim Your Passion, Restore Your Energy, and Build a Nursing Career That Sustains You
You became a nurse to heal, to help, to make a difference. But somewhere between understaffing, overwhelming patient loads, and systemic pressures, the career you loved started draining you dry.
You're exhausted in ways that days off don't fix. You feel cynical about work that once gave you purpose. You're running on empty, questioning how much longer you can keep this up.
From Burnout to Balance is your roadmap out of survival mode and back to thriving in the career you chose.
This book gives you ten evidence-based shifts that restore well-being, build resilience, and create sustainable balance—whether you're a new nurse finding your footing or a seasoned professional ready to reclaim your passion.
Healing Healthcare: A Journey from Burnout to Resilience and Sustainable Care
We have spent years telling healthcare professionals to be more resilient. To practice self-care. To set boundaries, manage stress, build coping skills. And all of that matters. But at a certain point, we have to ask a harder question: Why are we asking individuals to adapt to a system that is breaking them, instead of asking the system to change?
Healing Healthcare is the book that asks that question, and then answers it.
This is a book for hospital administrators who know their retention numbers are unsustainable and want a framework for changing course. For policymakers looking for evidence-based approaches to workforce stabilization. For nursing and medical educators rethinking how they prepare students for the reality of modern clinical work. For healthcare professionals who are tired of being told the problem is their inability to cope, and who want to see the conversation finally shift to where it belongs: the structures, incentives, and cultures that determine whether a career in healthcare is sustainable or sacrificial.
Healthcare doesn't need more resilient individuals. It needs a system worthy of the people who dedicate their lives to it. This book is a blueprint for building one.
Navigating Care Together: A Family's Guide to Compassionate Care
Are You Drowning in Caregiving Stress? This Guide Throws You a Lifeline.
When your loved one needs care, everything changes overnight. Suddenly you're juggling doctor appointments, medications, family drama, and your own breaking point. You feel lost, overwhelmed, and guilty for wanting help.
You're not alone. And you don't have to figure this out by yourself.
This 147-page guide covers everything from the emotional challenges of role reversal to the practical details of managing multiple medications. Each chapter includes specific actions you can take today to improve your caregiving experience.
Stop feeling overwhelmed. Start feeling confident.
Whether you're caring for aging parents, a sick spouse, or a family member with disabilities, this guide meets you where you are and shows you the way forward.
7 Tips to Navigate Your High-Stress Healthcare Career: Strategic Skills You Can Use Right Now to Cope With Stress and Burnout
Are you a burnt-out healthcare professional struggling to balance patient care with your own well-being? Discover practical, evidence-based strategies that work in real-world healthcare settings.
End Healthcare Burnout Without Leaving Your Career
ADHD & Neurodivergent Success
Transform your ADHD challenges into strengths with practical strategies designed for how your brain actually works. From managing distractions and leveraging AI tools to reframing negative thought patterns, these books provide neurodivergent-friendly approaches that help you thrive, not just cope.
ADHD A2Z: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities for Growth
You've heard the deficit narrative a thousand times — you're disorganized, you can't focus, you're "too much." Entire bookshelves are dedicated to helping you manage, cope, and compensate.
But here's what most of those books never mention: that scattered thinking is pattern recognition running at a speed most people can't touch. That hyperfocus — the thing no one talks about when they're listing your "symptoms" — is your cognitive ability to succeed at work when managed in the way that works best for you..
ADHD EDGE: The Million-Dollar Brain You've Been Ignoring
Stop Managing Your ADHD. Start Profiting From It. - You've been told your ADHD is something to overcome. That if you could just focus, organize, and think like "normal" people, then you'd finally succeed.
Here's the truth: Your ADHD isn't a weakness. It's a different operating system—and when you learn to work with it instead of against it, it becomes your greatest competitive advantage.
Richard Branson. Simone Biles. Michael Phelps. They didn't succeed despite their ADHD. They succeeded because of it. - ADHD Edge gives you the proven blueprint for doing the same.
ANTs: Transforming Automatic Negative Thoughts Into Positive Lessons
That voice in your head — the one telling you you're not good enough, smart enough, or strong enough — isn't your enemy. It's untrained potential.
Most books about negative thinking treat your inner critic like a problem to silence. Meditate it away. Affirmation it into submission. Slap a positive thought over it like a Band-Aid and hope for the best. But what if the real breakthrough isn't in fighting your negative thoughts — it's in learning what they're actually trying to tell you?
The Anti-Distraction Formula: A Simple 5-Minute Daily System
Stop scrolling and start achieving with The Anti-Distraction Formula—a simple 5-minute daily system that eliminates digital distractions so you can finally accomplish your personal growth goals.
You're not lazy or undisciplined; you're fighting against apps designed by neuroscientists to hijack your attention. This proven system shows you how to redesign your environment to make focus automatic and distraction difficult. Works even if you have ADHD or have struggled with focus your entire life.
Brilliantly Wired: Leveraging AI for ADHD and Neurodiverse Success
Every productivity system you've ever tried was designed for a neurotypical brain. The planners, the apps, the time-blocking methods — they all assume a mind that processes time linearly, sustains attention on command, and doesn't reorganize its own priorities seventeen times before lunch. No wonder they don't stick.
But what if the most powerful organizational tool ever created — artificial intelligence — could finally meet your brain where it actually is?
Brilliantly Wired sits at the intersection of two ideas whose time has come: the neurodiversity movement's recognition that ADHD and other neurodivergent minds aren't deficits to be corrected, and the AI revolution's ability to build personalized systems around how an individual actually thinks.
Ready to join us? Complete the form below and select "ADHD Book Club" to receive enrollment details.
We meet Wednesday evenings from 6:30-8:00 PM EST via Zoom starting in late Spring 2026, with group size limited to 8-12 participants for meaningful connection and discussion.
Investment is $297 per book (each book series runs for several weeks as we work through it together). Our first book will be ADHD 2.0, which you can purchase here in the format of your choice [click here].
Personal Growth & Leadership
Unlock your potential, elevate your leadership, and create lasting impact. These books guide ambitious professionals through authentic leadership development, communication mastery, stress management, and purpose-driven success—helping you grow into the leader you're capable of becoming without sacrificing who you are.
Books For Families & Young Readers
Delightful stories and creative activities for children and families. From heartwarming tales about brave cats to engaging coloring adventures, these books inspire imagination, build confidence, and create moments of joy and connection. The video below is the story of Cali's New Beginning (also available on Amazon and Audible).
Click on each book photo to be taken to the Amazon page.
The Video above is a reading of Cali's New Beginning: An Inspiring Tale of Love and Home is a heartwarming pet adoption story based on true events. Follow Cali, a sweet calico shelter cat with orange, black, and white fur and sparkling green eyes, as she finds her forever family with Jan and Don in this touching picture book about rescue animals, second chances, and unconditional love. Perfect for teaching children ages 4-8 about compassion, empathy, pet responsibility, and the lifesaving work of animal shelters. Ideal for bedtime stories, storytime, character education, social-emotional learning, and families considering adopting cats or kittens from rescue organizations.
Cali's New Beginning and The Adventures of Cali and Her Friends are available by clicking the button.
Take Paws: A Canine Coloring Journey:
Discover therapeutic relaxation and stress relief through 170 beautifully illustrated pages featuring nearly every dog breed—from playful puppies to wise senior canines—in this scientifically-backed mindfulness coloring book that helps reduce anxiety, promote calm focus, and celebrate the joy that dogs bring into our lives, perfect for dog lovers seeking a peaceful creative retreat.
Cali's Story (Books 1 & 2):
Follow the heartwarming journey of Cali, a sweet calico rescue cat who finds her forever home with Jan and Don, then discover her delightful daily adventures with feline friends Gus, Max, and Snowy—charming tales that celebrate pet adoption, friendship, and the special bonds between animals and their people, perfect for young readers ages 5-8.
Alphabet Animals Coloring Book:
This interactive coloring adventure features 40 beautifully illustrated mystery animals from A to Z that children must identify before coloring, transforming creative fun into an engaging educational experience that builds observation skills, animal knowledge, and critical thinking for young artists and curious learners of all ages.
Aardvark to Zebra: The Comprehensive Animal ABC Coloring Book:
Explore 210 pages featuring 178 diverse animal species—from mammals and birds to insects, fish, and reptiles—in this educational coloring adventure that combines alphabet learning with fascinating animal facts and endangered species awareness, providing hours of screen-free entertainment perfect for young explorers ages 4-10, homeschool activities, and curious minds who love wildlife and creative discovery.
Hi, I'm Susan Leys...
I've spent over 30 years working in some of the toughest corners of healthcare - emergency psychiatry and crisis management at places like Adventist Healthcare, Mass General Brigham, and Jefferson Medical Center. The work taught me something important: burnout isn't a personal failing. It's what happens when good people try to do impossible jobs without always having enough support.
After watching too many talented professionals leave careers they loved because they were drowning in stress, I started coaching. What began as informal conversations with colleagues turned into a consulting practice focused on one simple question: How do we help people stay in work they care about without sacrificing their wellbeing?
I've written 22 books because I keep finding gaps - things nobody talks about, questions people are afraid to ask, strategies that actually work but aren't taught in school. From healthcare burnout to ADHD coaching to helping families navigate the challenge of elderly care, I write about the messy, human parts of life that don't fit neatly into diagnoses or protocols.
These days, I live in Connecticut, with my rescue cat - Darla Sage. She's taught me more about resilience and unconditional love than most textbooks. When I'm not writing or working with clients, you'll find me in Newport, Rhode Island, taking photos of the coast and remembering that even in chaos, there's always beauty worth noticing.
If my work resonates with you, I'd love to connect. Thanks for dropping by - I hope you find something here that helps.